Meursault (neighboring Benjamin) is a man of little words and fewer acts. He slows down, smoking, convents and looks at the world with a zen -shaped detachment, barely pouring a tear to his mother’s funeral or raising a hand against injustice. Then he kills a man – an act whose misty motivation fueled the debate in classrooms and reading clubs since Albert Camus published “The Stranger” in 1942.
François Ozon, on the other hand, is anything but inert. For decades, he worked on a relentless, written, making, producing, producing and promoting a new film each year, now bringing his last to Venice. And yet, configuring the most read modern novel in France to its most prolific filmmaker is less obvious than it seems. Camus’ work continues precisely because of its elusive (and allusive) quality – its famous interiority more conducive to interpretation than to adaptation.
The most essential movement of Ozon is to fold decades of reassessment in its own version, remaining faithful both to the text and the long speech that it inspired. Do not expect a apathetic affair: it is a more sensual update, based on the pleasure of the world which pierces the armor of indifference of Meursault. (We can slightly hear the besieged Fritz Lang of the “contempt” caterpillar on the concession: “It’s existentialism … with sex!” What can I say, the formula works.)
The same goes for Ozon’s current partnership with Benjamin Voisin, struck for the first time in “Summer of 85” of the 2020s and now put to radically different use. His Meursault plays less like a Gallic Tom Ripley than a fatalistic ideologist – carried away by the unbearable lightness of being, and the duty to tell this truth, whatever the cost. His only conviction is that everything is Phooey, and as a clear witness in the eyes of colonial apartheid in French Algeria in the 1930s, he is not entirely out of the base.
While Ozon is closely with the original narration – follow Meursault through two chapters, first deriving in an impassive romance with the dactylographer Marie (Rebecca Marder), then trial for a murder, the colonial courts could otherwise ignore if they were not for its lack of destabilizing effect – “the stranger” of the shades of this world with an absent Coré indicator. At best, he was latent in the original novel, which spoke in a vernacular language of the 1940s, reducing all the inhabitants to the label of the “Arabs”, even if he later inspired a richness of post-colonial re-evaluations and companion works, in particular investigating the Algerian Meursauel Kamel Daoud.
The filmmaker borrows from both Camus and Daoud, placing his protagonist opposed to the hypocrisy against the greatest hypocrisy of an apartheid regime, while carving out more space for an Algerian perspective. Two anonymous personalities – brothers and sisters Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit) and Moussa (Abderrahmane Dehkani) – are now granted of names and interior lives, although the story always throws them as victims: she, of course, of Meursault, the brutal neighbor of Meursault. However, Ozon uses these familiar conspiracy points to deepen the psychology of his anti-hero. When Meursault looks passively the world around it, what can it perceive other than a legal system tilted in its favor – until, all of a sudden, it is not.
We can feel the creative joy of Ozon by opening a sacred text, producing a film which plays like a beautiful reissue with its notes and also scribbled in the margins. At the pivotal moment, when a Meursault, half successful and dabait, stumbled on Moussa on the beach, the two men are almost asleep, or at least with a reciprocal desire which echoes the sensual instincts of Ozon, withdrawing in the strange reminders long attached to the novel. The meeting makes us move – especially given the obvious eagerness of Meursault for Marie – and perhaps it does it too. This may be why, with the flowing sun, the French comes out a pistol.
Or maybe not. Perhaps we can never really know it, especially when you try to impose logic under the hard light of a legal system to always seek order in chaos. Arrested for killing a second class citizen, Meursault does not find his crime but his very effect at the trial. Does that seem familiar? If the echo to “the anatomy of a fall” feels weak, Ozon brings the point home with a devious cameo of “Hot Lawyer” of this film, Swann Arlaud, a metatextual wink to a novel whose intellectual heritage remains as agile as ever.
And yet, despite all its cerebral fulfillments, “The Stranger” is not lacking in simpler pleasures: the textures of coal and ash evoked by DP Manu Dacosse, the uncompvious intimacy between neighbor and Marder, the welcome purge of the Gallic Stalwarts like Arlaud and Leos Carax Mainstay Denis Lavant. Taken individually, they lend color and weight; Overall, they shape one of the richest and most satisfactory works of Ozon for years – those rarest of literary adaptations, which honors fundamental text precisely by finding something new to say.
